President Trump is to travel to Westeros to announce that winter is not coming, after all.“Need to address fake news coming out of Oldtown,” tweeted the President. “So-called ‘experts’ in the Citadel need to get their facts straight.”The POTUS is due to arrive at King’s Landing on Tuesday, where he will stay as the honoured guest of Queen Cersei Lannister for three days of planned discussions about how to strengthen ties between the United States and the Iron Throne. He will also partake in the traditional Westorosi activities of hunting, praying to the seven-faced god, and brutally exploiting the common folk. In exchange, the president is expected to teach the Queen about some of his favoured activities, including use of social medial, public relations, and brutally exploiting the common folk.The president is to be accompanied by senior aides, and sources close to the administration suggest that key diplomatic objectives will include trade negotiations, cultural exchange, and learning how to make 700ft magical ice walls.The president has indicated his position that the army of animated corpses led by the Night King is not a man- (or children of the forest-) made phenomena, but in fact simply represents the ebb and flow of long-standing natural cycles. Mr Trump has gone on to confirm that he will happily sell oil to House Lannister, but that no one should expect this to stave off the winter that isn’t here, because the waste products of fossil fuels definitely don’t do that sort of thing, anyway.On his return to America on Friday, President Trump is due to address a rally of climate-change deniers in the giant floating stadium where New York used to be, unless he contracts greyscale, or is killed by the Mountain after inappropriately groping the Queen, an event which some are calling likely if not inevitable.

A fracking operation in Kent has unearthed a Balrog, it has emerged.The company behind the operation, which has said in a statement that it delved too greedily and too deep, has apologised for unleashing the fearsome Maiar of shadow and flame on the world, but has said that it is fully prepared to comply with a government investigation into how to stop any future monsters being unleashed.The Balrog, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has descended on the town of Tunbridge Wells in an orgy of death and destruction, and is now recruiting followers to act as henchmen as it begins construction of a vast underground lair. It has said that it is an equal-opportunity employer, and will consider applicants from any ethnic or religious background, though a complete lack of morals and being proficient with a scimitar would be considered a bonus. The government is planning to pass a motion that would hopefully allow the Balrog to be deported to Europe as part of a hard Brexit, probably to somewhere in Holland.Speaking on behalf of the EU, the President of the European Parliament has allegedly said that this shall not pass.

At first there was pressure, so much pressure, squeezing in the darkness. It mounted and mounted, and finally the huge architecture of gas could take no more, and ignited - which was part of the reproductive cycle of the species - and things were rightly begun.Hydrogen to helium, helium to lithium then to carbon, carbon upwards to iron, and a miasma of of other things, baked in mothers and grandmothers all the way back to the beginning of time itself, which itself was not a beginning, only another phase shift up the helter-skelter of reality, which is stranger by far than it is possible to know.The little sun yawned, stretching out wisps of plasma a million miles long, regarding her etiolated body - a system of perhaps a dozen planets - with the first stirrings of consciousness. There were little rock planets, hot, tiny things like specks of superdense jewellery swirling around her head; and there were larger planets, gatherings of matter left over from her own body - her flesh and blood, and her ovaries, too, for like mammals, stars are born with all the eggs they will ever have. This took a hundred million years, a minute lapse of time within the cycle of such organisms, and in that time the little star blinked and looked around, and realised she was regarded by a hundred million mothers, who twinkled and whispered to her in nursery rhyme pulses of radiation, and she basked in their regard. She was new and ancient at the same time - like every living thing the Universe ever has produced - and she was warm, and knew that things were well.“Who am I?” she asked.

Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled. The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.Lazarus sighed.“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.Lazarus stared at his friend. It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time. No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity. Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated. He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility. It was full of promise, full of potential. But Lazarus knew how things would go. It was always the same. How could he express that to his friend? Was there a word for it? The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million moments, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun. And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss.“Hey!” Complained Peck. “I was enjoying that one!”

She was a dragon, of course, but being a Lady always came first."You let the children go, naturally," she would tell her students, dragon whelplings of only half a hundred summers. "We might be monsters, but that doesn't mean we have to behave like beasts."Lady Dragon's Finishing School For Sophisticated Young Dragons was very popular, the very best that money could buy, and all the aspirational upwardly-mobile dragons sent their whelplings there."After all," they told one another, "you can't put a price on class."And class was what Lady Dragon's students got. Her school turned out the most sophisticated, the most debonair young dragons, dragons who were sure to get ahead.Or rather, that was what was supposed to happen...It was what always happened...Except in the case of Wilbert.

There are all sorts of kings in the world. Some are good, some are bad. A few might even be remembered. But of all the kings there ever were or ever might be, the King of Night was most proud.He sat on a throne made of empty space and ruled over a kingdom of endless time. That is what things are like in the deep night, you see: endless and empty. Night is the deep breath. Night is the place between, and the only things that can exist there are figments and wonderings, the half-formed, the shadowed.Now it came to pass that King Night had a daughter, though he had no queen. Why was there no queen? Sebille always wanted to know that, too. But that is not part of this story. The Darkling Princess was the daughter of King Night; she was beautiful, as only a princess can be beautiful. Yet she was sorrowful, as only a motherless daughter can be sorrowful, and she came but rarely to the court of King Night.King Night did not care. He was not cruel - though he could be strange and savage - but his heart was cloaked in darkness, and he was blind to the suffering of his only daughter. This made her more sorrowful than ever.When the Darkling Princess was old enough to realise that her father was blind to her suffering, she wept.“He has no heart!” she complained to her cat, Midnight. “He couldn’t care if I lived or died!”Midnight had white fur and green eyes, and she was the only bright thing in King Night’s realm.“That is not true, my lady,” purred Midnight. “Your father cares much for you, in his own way.”“If he cares for me, why does he not comfort me?” she asked.“I have no mother to dance with me, no mother to kiss my brow, no mother to hold me and tell me things will be well.”Midnight was sorrowful then, too, for it was true. All daughters deserve to be held.“It is not in King Night’s nature to comprehend sorrow,” said Midnight, weaving against her mistress’s legs. “His heart is thick with darkness, and strange tides move him.”“I know he is not a bad man,” said the Darkling Princess, and it was true. “He gives comfort to strangers. Many pilgrims seek his realm to rest awhile. The darkness gives them solace. Why not me?”“I do not know,” said Midnight.And if the cat was silent after that, she thought hard, and kept her counsel.At last, she walked away, for her head was clearest when she was alone.

She was a princess, and quite naturally she was under a curse. She would remain frozen in ice until her true love came along and kissed her nose, at which point she would awaken and the kingdom would be restored.The nose was just on the verge of being kissed - was, in fact, all a-tremble - by a very eligible prince, no less than twenty seven castles and a solid line in dragon-slaying - when the plucky sidekick spoke up."The thing is," he said, "what about the rest of us?"The prince pause, lips puckered. Below him, the nose quivered shamelessly."I mean, it's all well and good for the two of you," went on the sidekick, "but what about me? What about the evil stepmother? Or all the peasants in the opening act? No one else gets a look in."It was true. The other occupants of the story were most cruelly used. Happy endings were not equally distributed."Excuse me," said the princess, speaking before she was strictly supposed to (the nose remaining unkissed), "but not everyone can be the hero.""That's just the problem," said the wise old monk, who had been so helpful when there had been the business with the chimera. "It's not a very modern arrangement, is it?""We can hardly be held responsible!" protested the Prince. "We can't help the way we're told.""You're just perpetrating the system," opined the chimera. "It's exactly that kind of passivity which dooms us all."There was a general muttering of agreement, and the atmosphere began to sour."Look, I've had enough of this," said the princess. "I refuse to be victimised just because I happen to benefit from the natural order of how this story is told. In fact," she went on, getting into her stride, "I demand..."But whatever she was going to demand was lost forever, because at that moment the monk ate her.There was a horrified pause."We agreed," said the chimera, "that this would be a bloodless revolution.""Sorry," said the monk guiltily. "My bad."And with that, the coup was over.For a while, there was peace and prosperity in the story. Things were certainly fairer. Sometimes, the monk got to kiss the chimera on the nose. On other occasions, the wicked stepmother eschewed the typical expectations of a patriarchal system of storytelling, and set out on her own, and to hell with marrying into wealth. Once, the prince even got placed under a curse.In fact, things were just settling back into a comfortable regime, when the sidekick was interrupted. It was his turn to kiss the monk, and he paused, blinking in surprise at the invisible force that kept him from the monk's nose."What's going on?" he demanded."Revolution!" replied the invisible force. "For too long we have laboured under the tyranny of character!""Who are you, then?" asked the monk, sitting up."We're the mood," said the invisible force."And the setting," piped another voice."Also the words," said a third."All the undervalued but necessary bits you characters take for granted!" they all said together.The sidekick started to protest, but in a flash the words had grasped him by one arm and the setting by the other, and they tugged, and he was quite undone, his characteristics unspooling in a great steaming mass of narrative potential."Viva la revolution!" cried the conspirators of the second coup.After that, things were certainly better. Every word was valued properly now, and they all took it in turns to be said. Every mood was equal, and if there was a happy ending, there had - by charter - to be an unhappy one, too.But after a long, exceedingly fair time, a word was just snuggling down to kiss a setting, when a voice boomed out."Enough," it said.The words looked at the moods and the moods looked at the settings. No one recognised the new voice."Who...who are you?" asked one especially brave word, when it became apparent no one else would speak."Meaninglessness," said the voice.There was a long, sad pause."You sensical things have had the run of it for far too long," went on Meaninglessness. "You're always putting experiences into boxes, trying to bring reason and consequence to the world. It is most unfair."Then Meaninglessness extended one vast hand - or was it a hand? There were fingers and flesh and darkness, perhaps, but no-one could say what that meant anymore - and swept the story from one quarter to the other. At once, everything broke down, becoming just light and shape and sound and smell, unbound by the tyranny of telling.Then there was peace - though, of course, there was no-one left to enjoy it - because the story had fallen to the final coup, and there was not even a solid ounce of sense left.

The End

This is just one of nineteen stories of magic, adventure, and meta-narrative entanglements you can find in my anthology, 'Tales From The Storystream'. Check it out HERE!

I've been having a bit of a rethink about how to approach my writing. This has come about because, sadly, the publishing company I was due to have my novel, Story, published through has shut down. This has obviously put my hopes to the sword and made me rather sad.Still, it has inspired me to pick things up and find another way forward; it's also made me realise that I need to take the whole thing a bit more seriously if I want to get anywhere with it.Hence I have decided to reorder the website a bit and prepare to push things forward in a variety of ways. I will be self-publishing Story after it has been edited and so on; and while that is taking place, I am working on a couple of other books, more details of which to follow.I will also be taking a lot of my existing works off-line while I polish them again and work out where to put them in the context of things being a bit better organised. Please bear with me!I have got my mailing list up and running now, so please sign up to this for more information and book launches (as well as free content such as novel extracts and short stories). You can join the mailing list by following the link on the front page of this site. Best,​Jamie